This is a message from Patrick Volkerding in regards to his thoughts on Gnome and Slackware. It was originally posted on the Dropline Gnome Forum. Editor's note: Pat has made similar comments to me as well regarding Gnome's bugs and maintainance problems.

Honestly, how can they drop Gnome? No one drops anything from an open source project. If people want it, and there's demand, people will simply use Gnome anyway. To be honest, Slack is a good distribution but I don't really see it being a massively popular distribution. More users for Ubuntu then!

KDE was dropped from UserLinux but it hasn't mattered because people started doing things with KDE and Debian anyway. As an aside, UserLinux hasn't got a chance of being successful in the business arena they're targetting because the reasons given were all about development licensing - wrong attitude for that audience. It will be interesting to hear Pat's exact reasons for potentially dropping Gnome. He's right in a way about building Gnome. People say that KDE and C++ takes longer to build, but Gnome has more packages in total (and the total build process certainly isn't straightforward) and it does take a few days to iron out where any problems might be and get it working from the get-go. This has held true on whatever distribution I've tried, but Portage (easiest compile ever!) and apt ease the burden for most. However - it's got to be built and tested first! Whether he feels that effort is taking too much out of the project and him, I don't know.

Gnome won't be gone, as I think people will just co-ordinate things with Dropline in a better distribution of effort.